SlideMagic Blog

A lecture about designing sales and investor presentations

A series of videos of a lecture Jan Schultink gave at NYU in 2011. Venture capitalist Mark Suster (author of the blog Both sides of the table) introduced Jan’s talk. The event was hosted buy SalesCrunch (a startup that was renamed Crunched, and later acquired by Clearslide). The content of my talk closely follows the topics discussed in my book about presentation design.

Let’s start with Mark’s introduction.

Mark Suster has done live pitches in front of the camera. Here is my review of one them. His feedback to the pitching investors is interesting. But what is more interesting is observing his body language. Mark has created a great library of his blog posts about pitching to VCs

Below are the videos of my presentation design seminar that followed. There were 2 sessions, one on designing investor presentations, and one on designing sales presentations. About half of the content in the talk overlaps.

The founding team is a one of the most important inputs in a venture capitalist’s mind when she decides to invest in your startup or not. For a large part, an investor will size you up during the pitch by judging how you present and how you answer questions, information that is not written down anywhere on a slide.

Still, the team slide is a crucial part of any VC presentation. It is difficult to put CV information in a slide. There is lots of information, and CV entries require lots of text (long university, company, and position names). So I usually end up designing 2 versions: one to go in the front and one with full details to go in the appendix (the latter is meant for reading, not presenting).

You should adopt the design of your high level team slide, depending on what you want to say:

• We have many of years of experience, a very long time line
• We have worked together before, multiple time lines circling the overlap in your careers
• We worked for big name companies: company logos
• We have complementary skills, some sort of (slightly cliche) puzzle that shows what skill set the individual team members bring to the table.

And if you can:

• Put in high-quality head shots of the team members
• Or even better: an energetic group picture.

When an investor is running out of time, conversations often end with “why don’t you email me an executive summary”.

Upon hearing that, startups wil scramble to produce the well-known executive summary format, compressing the entire pitch deck in just a few paragraphs:

• Has to fit 2 pages, so no space for visuals, use a small font or narrow margins if required
• Stuff the text with buzzwords and big numbers
• Include all the features of your product
• Spend a lot of paragraphs on CV details of the founding team

Think of this from the investor perspective: this document is boring and so dense that it would take the same amount of time to read it start to finish than to page-down through a slide deck. Here is an alternative: “I am sending you a 5 minute pitch”

• A short and visual document, but it could be longer than 2 pages
• Explaining the investment opportunity in human language
• Focus more on the problem, less on financial,  product details, and team details (that can come later)
• The objective is not to get the investment (yet), but to get invited to the next stage in the investment process, possibly a full pitch meeting

The financial forecast in a VC pitch presentation combines two different pieces of financial information in one chart. Still, you can treat them differently.

1. The short term burn rate. This is information should highly precise and accurate. An investor is 100% sure she will “lose” this money. If you cannot be accurate, you probably do not have a clue what investment is required to build the company
2. The long-term dream. There is no point specifying that you will have $50,342,784.12m sales in year 5. You just don’t know and claiming that you do will lose you realism points. Explain to an investor why you think it will be ~$50m

The Internet is full with layouts of investor pitches, they all go something like this:

• What’s the pain
• What’s the solution
• What’s the revenue model
• What’s the edge over the competition
• Who’s the team
• What’s the traction of the company

Your pitch should address all these issues, but think about your potential investor’s mind when deciding about the structure. You might have to deviate from the text book approach.

Investors are constantly evaluating critical questions. And when they (think they) have answered them, they move on to the next one. Questions are not always in the order of your pitch deck.

• “That guy looks 12!” “Oh, he is 28 and already climbed Mount Everest”
• “They are doing what exactly?” “Ah, something to do with mobile payments”
• “Isn’t that a Groupon me-too?”
• “That would take 5 years to develop!”
• “Great idea, but where are the dollars?”

If there is an obvious elephant in the room, you might as well address it early on in the pitch. Your audience will be calmer and more open to digest the other important points you want to make.

Far more important than sticking to the text book pitch structure.

Far more important than spending time repeating the obvious (i.e., stats on how big Facebook has become).

A heads up. It looks like I will be in New York April 4-7. I will be giving one or two presentations about making better presentations (VC pitching, sales). More details to follow.

A post inspired by a question on Quora: how to talk about competitors in a VC pitch?

• There is no business that does not have competitors. If you say so, you just lost a lot of maturity and credibility points. Maybe there is no company that does the exact thing you do, but people have alternatives. (Before the advent of the car, people used horses to get around). Discuss them.
• There is not much point in hiding the truth. Smart investors will find out in subsequent phases of the due diligence, and when they find a big competitor at this stage, you will have lost significant integrity points.
• Find a good visualization to show your distinctiveness. Put the competitors in some sort of 2x2, or a heat map that shows on what aspects you are similar and what aspects you are different.
• Sometimes competitive differentiation is not just about product features. Maybe your competitors are not focussed enough (they are part of a larger organization), maybe you move faster than your competitors (“look at their roll outs over the past year”), maybe you focus on a different geography.

In short be honest, but have a good story at the same time.

A copy of a new section I wrote for my corporate web site.

In the very beginning, the only asset a startup has is often the VC pitch deck. Here are some suggestions for designing good VC pitch presentations. In the end I will list some of the resources you can tap in. There is a lot of information and advice available about startup pitches.

Different pitches for different meetings There are different investor presentations in a fund raising process. There is the line up in a big conference where everyone has 1 minute to pitch (not very effective). There is the 10 minute phone call, the 20 minute coffee chat. The first meeting at the VC office, the presentation to the full partner group. Prepare your story and deck for each situation. As you go through the investment process funnel, your story will shift from talking about what the company is about, to how the company will do it.

Do a pitch without a deck Practice a 20 minute pitch without slides in front of a friend. Record yourself, listen to your self. What sequence did you use to tell your story? What examples did you use? Where did you have the urge to take a piece of paper and sketch a framework? Where were you tempted to open your laptop to show a detailed chart with financials? All this gives you a clue about the sort of visuals you need to support your natural story.

It is about you When an investor looks at entrepreneur, 50% of the attention will go to the content of the presentation, the other 50% will be spent on making a personal assessment of you, the presenter. Are you a good person to work with, who takes input from a Board? Do you have a sense of realism? Are you fired up for the roller coaster ride or hedging by keeping your day job? Can I trust you? Can you actually sell? Can you pull it off? These are all questions that cannot be answered by the slides you are presenting, they are answered by reading in between the lines.

Most startups pitching for VC money would pound the audience with billion dollar market forecasts produced by market research firms such as IDC or Gartner. They are important, but they do not touch the gut feel of an investor. Often, showing a small street scene without a single number in it, does the trick.

As an example, take online gambling, and let’s go to Spain. Anyone who spend some time there has seen the numerous lottery stands scattered across the cities. What if all these people could get the same thrill of purchasing a lottery ticket on their mobile device, rather than standing (visibly annoyed) in a long line? The opportunity is staring you in the face, right in front of you. The VC is reminded of it every time he drives to the office, every day of the week.

If you are interested, a recent blog post by Seth Godin about why these people are not buying the ticket to win the big prize. Image credit to Paul and Jill.

Can I use humor in an investor presentation? (Well, the question applies to all serious presentations). I would be careful. Humor is a great ice breaker when it comes naturally, even in serious presentations such as a pitch to investors. However, making it come naturally is hard to plan. That rehearsal in front of your friends in the living room sofa is a different environment from the corporate conference room.

If you used a joke spontaneously in a previous presentation, you could try to use it again (i.e., program it), in another one if you feel that mood and energy in the room is right. But only then. And never put jokes in writing on slides or in images, you lose the option to pull them out at the last minute. Also, you do not control the digital after-life of the presentation file after the live presentation.